US's largest newspaper chain partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

With that going on, it's hard to imagine there once was a time where the news paper publishers hat little to no signal on what actually sold news papers. Given that papers were only sold as a bundle of articles and most sold through subscribers, they pretty much had to guess. So they had a rough direction they knew their readers expected and they had some sparse feedback from the "letters to the editor" but you had to be really angry to follow through on writing a physical letter, getting a stamp and walk to the post box just to complain.

I would argue, that helped journalism because journalists probably assumed that their readers would hold them to the same standards they hold the writers of the other papers too.

Even with moral issues aside, Palantir is absurdly expensive and seems to be focused on selling buzzwords over actual value and tech. It’s like crack for non-technical big wigs.

I dislike USA Today. It feels like lowest common denominator fluffy news.

Also, I remember staying at a hotel once where they delivered one to every guest room.

Setting aside politics and personalities, are Palantir's products any good? At least on the surface, their products seem to have many competitors, so is the product quality actually driving their growth?

"After 12 months of data analysis, we have arrived at the conclusion that our average customer was born before 1957 and thinks the country to going to hell in a hand basket."

Title could be closer to: USA Today Co. partners with Palantir to analyze audience data

That's like eating dinner with a chainsaw

Imagine paying a billion dollars for some contract software devs to add tracking cookies to your websites.

Let's also remember: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/can-ai-judge-journalism-a-...

Objection (objection.ai), which proposes to apply AI to “adjudicate the truth of journalism.” Pay $2,000 to contest allegations in a published story or various social media sources.

Personally, I ditched almost all western media outlets altogether because of their zionist and fascist tendencies. The propaganda was much too obvious. I don't think a Palantir partnership is going to change my mind.

Hacker News occasionally indexed Palestinian voices but this was a breath of fresh air compared to outlets like USA Today. I'm actually constantly conflicted about the sources I consume and still seek alternatives. If they want me to view more of their content, including more authoritarian surveillance technology is not the right move.

> “It’s important to note all of our data remains our data,”

Despite all the negative attention about "palantir taking your data", this kind of data privacy is actually why so many organizations choose Palantir over the large AI providers. Palantir uses OSS AI models which don't feed back into the large lab training data and sets up firewalled instances per customer to give them total data sovereignty.

(and no, I have no financial stake in Palantir)